Banking Sector

The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire, is a documentary, which shows how Britain transformed from a colonial power into a global financial power. Up to half of the global offshore wealth may be hidden in British offshore jurisdictions , such as Jersey and the Caymans Islands.

There are plenty of “market experts” who believe they know the cause of the next crisis. Reality is that nobody knows for certain. What we do know is that the next crash is not far away. The current market cycle is officially the second-largest bull market since World War II. The bull market is officially 106 months old.

Exchange rate fluctuations influence economic activity not only via the standard trade channel, but also through a financial channel, which operates through the impact of exchange rate fluctuations on borrowers’ balance sheets and lenders’ risk-taking capacity. The paper explores the “triangular” relationship between (i) the strength of the US dollar, (ii) cross-border bank flows and (iii) real investment.

The growth trend has been declining in many mature economies not just since the crisis, but for several decades. This slowdown in growth has led to lower long-term interest rates. The structural causes of this trend of slowing growth is a subject of controversy among specialists. Demographic and technological developments are mentioned, as are the effects of the financial cycle, which may be out of sync with the business cycles. I do not want to pre-empt this ongoing discussion. Instead, I would like to focus on two issues, which in the current context are very relevant from a monetary policy perspective – regardless of the structural causes underlying the weak economic growth.

The financial sector is on the brink of collapse. The country that probably gave the English-speaking world the word for bank – medieval Italian merchants traded with each other on a bench known as banca – has a €360bn problem in its fragmented banking sector. This is the amount of non-performing loans, loans on which customer’s repayments have fallen behind.